Tiger Eye, Natural, Drop, One Pendant, 30x18mm with Metal Alloy Bail 

Tiger's eye is a variety of quartz which is a hard, crystalline mineral compose of silicon and oxygen. Quartz is the second most abundant mineral in Earth's continental crust, behind feldspar.  Tiger’s Eye which exhibits a fascinating and constantly shifting light effect with the slightest change in position of the light or of the stone. It is a chatoyant gemstone that is usually a metamorphic rock with a golden to red-brown color and a silky luster. Chatoyancy is from the French word for "cat's eye".

These semiprecious beads come in your choice of their natural, unenhanced brown-gold state, or in heat-treated colors like blue or red.  Heating Tiger’s Eye is common to enhance colors. It can be found in Australia, Burma, India, Namibia, South Africa, the United States, Brazil, Canada, China, Korea, and Spain.

Can you believe this little piece of quartz used to be worth half an ounce of gold per carat in the 1870s? Now you can get it for a song because there are abundant quantities of it especially in South Africa.

Hardness 7

Brown Tiger’s Eye is a natural stone that has had no treatment other than cutting, drilling, and polishing in China.

Metal Alloy is a metal made by combining two or more metallic elements, base metals, to give greater strength or resistance to corrosion. In mining and economics, base metals refer to industrial non-ferrous metals excluding precious metals, like silver, gold, and platinum. Base Metals include copper, aluminum, nickel, tin, zinc antimony, bismuth, lead and many more. Metal Alloy, also known as Pewter and is usually a tin based alloy 85-95% of the time but could also be zinc based.

In December of 1994, The US Safe Drinking Water Act defined Lead-free as having less than 0.25% lead content. Most newly made solid pewter on the market today is considered lead free by these standards. But it is still recommended to not give children Metal Alloy jewelry if there is any chance, they will put it in their mouths!